Tanja Pak / Mid-Breath - with a photograph

In her new book Mid-Breath, artist Tanja Pak explores her work with glass in relation to breath and transparency.

"With reference to her glass works, Pak herself says that she sees them again and again as membranes, shells, cocoons of a breath … Thus we find ourselves again in a different space in-between, wondering whose breath it was: she blew some smaller works herself, while bigger objects are created in collaboration with masters in collective glassworks, but her work is still identifiably hers as, through collaboration, supra-personal breath is thematised – even when it is not blown glass: even when hot material flows into a mould to be transformed into a frozen form and our experience of it unfreezes it into a primary state. The supra-personal beauty of these glass objects is also due to the fact that the artist does not seek to make something new with each new one, but that they are something new as they emerge as new with the pureness of natural forms – they are always new in the sense that breathing is always new. The artist says: “My work is about breathing.”